Consider the Big Dumper. Scruffy, ruddy, built like a truck. Large mitts for hands, and a legendary derrière—a seat that assists in hours of squatting, a professional occupation, and in hitting bodacious home runs. Rarely has a catcher garnered as much attention as Cal Raleigh, of the Seattle Mariners, and of the eponymous big butt, has; he deserves even more. Coming into the backside of the season, Raleigh is giving one of the most astounding all-around performances of all time, even if his production ends up slowing down, as it surely must. Before the All-Star break last week, Raleigh had thirty-eight home runs. He needed only eleven more to break the single-season record for a catcher, and seventeen more to break Mickey Mantle’s single-season record for a switch-hitter. He was on pace to break Ken Griffey, Jr.,’s single-season home-run record for a Mariner. He has already surpassed his own season high. He had more dingers than the great Aaron Judge.
All of that is more than enough to elicit some admiring glances. But Raleigh also plays the most badass position on the field—and he is among the best at doing that, too. A good catcher must anchor a rotation, fool the umpire, outsmart the batter, keep runners in check, make myriad quick decisions and adjustments, and be the last, unbreachable wall of a team’s defense. Raleigh won a Gold Glove last season, and led all catchers in games and innings behind the plate. He caught more base runners attempting to steal than any other catcher in the league. He was among the leaders in framing pitches—making balls, especially borderline ones, appear as strikes—and in a more complicated stat known as defensive runs saved. He did all this while elevating a rotation riddled by injuries.
The catcher stands just behind the center of the action: behind the batter, behind a mask and padding, in the frame but mostly out of view. By all accounts, Raleigh would be happy with relative anonymity. Judge is baseball’s folk hero, its Paul Bunyan. Raleigh looks as though he would be more at home in a beer league, with an actual beer in hand, than at a photo shoot. But his glorious rear got in the way of that.
The nickname was coined by his teammate Jarred Kelenic, who first came up with it when Raleigh was getting into his catching stance in the minor leagues. When Raleigh was called up to the majors, Kelenic went public with it. “Big Dumper to the show,” he tweeted. Raleigh, it seems, was not thrilled with the ribbing, though he’d had his own fun. While playing for the Single-A Modesto Nuts, with a similarly beefy player named Keegan McGovern, he declared himself and McGovern the Beef Boys. He even wrote an anthem, set to the tune of “Drift Away”: “Gimme the Beef Boys and free my soul / I wanna get lost in your casserole and drift away.”
His parents, who owned a screen-printing business in North Carolina, made T-shirts emblazoned with the phrases “100% Pure Beef: No Added Steroids or Fillers,” with the outline of a cow. Back then, Raleigh was just settling into his groove. He had been the ninetieth pick in the 2018 draft, the seventh catcher taken. Scouts and executives assumed that he’d have to give up catching eventually, or forget the switch-hitting and pick a side. In Modesto, he struggled for a while, but he was stubborn, a hard worker, and a quick learner. A tip from a hitting coach to bring his hands forward sooner on his swing and to be more decisive at the plate led to a surge in power. He struggled again when he reached the majors: in 2021, his batting average sunk below .200, and, early in the 2022 season, he was batting .083, with dismal on-base and slugging percentages. He was sent back to the minors. He was called back up a little more than a week later, when the usual starter injured his shoulder, and he started to find his swing. At the end of the 2022 season, he hit a full-count, pinch-hit, walk-off homer to send the Mariners to the post-season for the first time in two decades. The Big Dumper was now a hero in Seattle.
It was the stuff of a little kid’s dream. The moniker, meanwhile, was a marketer’s dream, at least in the minds of the P.R. folks who worked for the Mariners, who knew a golden ass when they saw one. The team sold jerseys with Raleigh’s number below the name “Big Dumper.” For infants, there were Big Dumper onesies. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, there was a walk-up playlist made entirely of booty songs, including “Baby Got Back,” by the Seattle native Sir Mix-a-Lot. They encouraged fans who were trying to dump someone to send an e-mail to bigdumper@mariners.com, promising that Raleigh would help. (Last week, the team’s X account seemed to offer the Big Dumper’s services to the wife of the C.E.O. who was seen canoodling another woman at a Coldplay concert.) Before the All-Star Game this year, the team launched a slogan encouraging voters to choose Raleigh: “Be a peach, vote Cal! 🍑” After the All-Star Game, Raleigh announced that he’d signed a partnership deal with Honey Bucket, a porta-potty company.
In the meantime, he won the Home Run Derby. (His father pitched—and accidentally plunked him once—and his little brother served as catcher.) He also started the All-Star Game, hit a single, and nearly got another, when he lined a pitch from Clayton Kershaw into left field, only for Kyle Tucker to make a slick catch. “Suck it, Big Dumper,” Kershaw joked in response.
No one knows better than a catcher how fine the margins are. Raleigh had nearly been knocked out of the first round of the derby, before going on to win it. Sometimes you suck it, sometimes you soar. (The derby was not his only big win this month: according to the Athletic, the Mariners’ clubhouse attendants recently awarded him the Golden Locker award, for having the cleanest and most organized locker.) It’s unlikely that Raleigh will keep up his torrid pace all season. Catchers need breaks, and regression is every baseball nerd’s favorite word. In July, leading up to the All-Star break, Raleigh was batting only .135 for the month. (All of his hits were home runs.) But forget the forecasts, and delight in the rearview. Raleigh not only makes it seem like anything is possible but that the impossible is already happening. Breaking records by Mickey Mantle? Sixty homers? The Mariners, contending? Grab a beer and gimme the beef, boys. ♦
